Quote:Hi,
It really is.
No it isn't
Quote:In the wake of WW II and the mega research programs instituted then (the Manhattan project being the most renown, but others to develop jet engines, better ciphers, etc. also existed) it became the norm to expect government funding for research. Prior to that, research was mostly the pastime of people who were, for one reason or another, obsessed with knowledge. After that, it became, for many, a big business.
First, you forget to mention the difference between the US/USSR and the rest of the world. And because climate research doesn't take place solely in the US you should note this difference. Government funding has always been a lot lower in europe for example. This has indeed mainly to do with the enormous available funds for defence research.
Research is not big business. Most professors could earn at least double if they would choose to go and work for a company. Do you really think all the most intelligent people work for banks? There is a large group of very smart people that stays at university.
Quote:The people in charge of making those grants are not experts in the fields that they are funding -- they aren't completely ignorant, but they aren't active researchers, either.
Many funding schemes use peers to choose between different applications.
Quote:There is much more demand for research funding than there is funding available. To determine who gets the funding, the agencies need to evaluate the importance of the requests. So, if one researcher says "I'd like to be funded to study climatic change because it is cool" and another says "I'd like to be funded to study climatic change because it is taking us to the end of civilization as we know it", guess who gets funded?
In the west there is much more funding than there is demand (if that would be possible:) ), we have lots of money, but not enough researchers. Our kids see quickly that they can make much more money when the do some simple job at a bank, become a lawyer or compete in a reality show that the amount of autochtonous teenagers that want to become scientists is very low. That's is why in the US and northern europe more than half of the PhD students are from other countries.
Scientific results are peer reviewed before being published, sometimes this reviewing does not happen correctly (I know from experience), strange things happen. But comparing climate research with people not believing Galileo when he said the earth was round, or Einstein when he was posing his theories is soemthing different. The scientific is (luckily) very large at the moment, and there is enough possibility to (when you have scientific proof) comment on results that you say are wrong. Climate scpetics have more than enough possibility to be heard.
Your way of thinking on this subject is also a kind of role reversal. Industry has always been an important source of funding for research, even government funding was often used for industrially interesting subjects. Especially after the first concerns about climate change were voiced, the 'sceptics' had much more funding.
Quote:Then there is the fact that scientific computer models are seldom, if ever, written by people who are trained in computer fields. They are written by scientists who have picked up programming as an avocation. The papers generated by these models may be peer reviewed, but the models themselves very seldom are. At most, they are shared among the researchers in a field and some small degree of feedback is given. Usually, those obtaining copies of the code just want it to duplicate work that has been done and look at the code just enough to get it running on their system (often a non-trivial task if the code, like so many scientific codes, is written in a dialect of FORTRAN specific to one machine or class of machines). So misconceptions, poor assumptions, and downright errors are propagated. There is a standard analysis library that has known errors in it, but they are uncorrected so that present and future work will be comparable to that done in the past.
Finally, a model is often judged to be 'good' or 'bad' on the basis of what it predicts. But since there often isn't anything objective to compare it to, then it boils down to the subjective. The modeler often has a general idea of what he expects. If the model more or less gives him that, then it is good, otherwise it isn't. It appears that none of the climate models presently in existence can fully reproduce the *known* history of the planet. Why then believe them for the future?
I have too little experience with modelling to comment on this.
Quote:I don't claim, nor think, that there is a big conspiracy. From my lifetime experience of modeling physical processes, I think that it is just a combination of the pressures of obtaining funding and the natural human inclination to become emotionally attached to our pet theories that leads to the situation we have. The field of climatology is exposed to political scrutiny that could lead to regulations, contracts, etc. And so, a conspiracy explanation is attractive. But look at the situation in cosmology, where there is no external pressures, and yet over the past fifty years various theories have been in vogue, and those researchers not subscribing to the theory du jour have had great difficulty in getting positions, funding, or even published.
Science is a nearly perfect system for obtaining knowledge, but it is conducted by imperfect people. In the long run, it works out. In the short, it is often dominated by personalities, prejudices, and expectations.
--Pete
There is a small truth in here. But mainly (and I am not talking about you personally) it is a case of 'zoals de waard is vertrouwt hij zijn gasten' (the landlord trusts his guess, like the way he is).
Many people with no university experience think that scientist are a bunch of corrupt and lying people working for some government interest. Although, as I said, it is true that the peer review system is not perfect the scientific community is probably the most transparent part of society there is.